Thompson: Too Much Belly Fire Not Good

WASHINGTON, Iowa (AP) — Fred Thompson said Saturday he's not consumed with winning the White House and that a president with too much fire in the belly is not necessarily a good thing in a dangerous world.

"I like to say that I'm only consumed by very, very few things and politics is not one of them," Thompson said at a town hall meeting in nearby Burlington. "The welfare of my country and my kids and grandkids are one of them. But if people really want in their president a super type-A personality, someone who has gotten up every morning and gone to bed every night thinking about for years how they could achieve the presidency of the United States, someone who could look you straight in the eye and say they enjoy every minute of campaigning — I ain't that guy."

Thompson said some candidates have become too absorbed by the process and have lost sight of the ultimate need to serve the country.

"Nowadays, it's all about fire in the belly," he said. "I'm not sure in the world we live in today it's a terribly good thing that a president has too much fire in his belly."

Burlington attorney Todd Chelf, whose question elicited Thompson's response, said he appreciated the reply. "It's almost refreshing to see that kind of response as opposed to what we get normally," he said. "I think there's a passion there. I think that it's an old-fashioned passion."

"I am not consumed by personal ambition," Thompson said. "I will not be devastated if I don't do it. I'm not particularly interested in running for president." He said others encouraged him to run and he decided it was the right thing to do.

"I approached it from a standpoint ... of kind of a marriage," he said. "You know if one side of the marriage has to be really talked into the marriage, you know it probably ain't going to be a good deal for either one of them. But if you mutually think that this is a good thing — in this case you think it's a good thing for the country — then you have an opportunity to do some wonderful things together. I'm offering myself up. I'm saying that I have the background and capability and the concern to do this."

However, he said people who question his commitment should realize that he dropped lucrative television and radio contracts to run and no longer accepts paid speaking tours to make the run.

"I and my family have made sacrifices for me to be sitting here today," he said. "I haven't had any income for a long time because I'm doing this. I guess a man would have to be a total fool to do all those things and to be leaving his family, which is not a joyful thing at all, if he didn't want to do it."

"I go out of my way to be myself cause I don't want anybody to think they're getting something they're not getting," he said. "I'm not consumed by this process. I'm not consumed with the notion of being president. I'm simply saying I'm willing to do what's necessary to achieve it if I'm in synch with the people and if the people want me or somebody like me."

At his stop in the community of Washington, Thompson joked about Democrat John Edwards, who had an event at the same time just a few blocks away.

"I understand my friend John Edwards is in town. He's over at the library. I hope he learns something while he's over there," Thompson said. "I like our bus better. Go out and check them out."

Thompson was accompanied on his Saturday campaign stops by Iowa Rep. Steve King.

As I said a long time ago before Fred was even in the running:

Way back at the beginning, before anyone said anything about him, I was wishing Fred Thompson would get in the race. He doesn't seem to me to be someone who has been lusting for power since his earliest years. That's a principal fault of Clinton, Kerry, and Gore. The Presidency defines their being. It was all about them.

I want someone who takes on the mantle reluctantly but who also will be able to make clear for people what the United States was supposed to be about: a land of liberty where the federal government protects the people from foreign enemies and the Constitution protects the people from the federal government, leaving everything else up to the ingenuity, hard work, and voluntary associations of the citizenry.

We have now reached a place where a major party claims there really is no foreign enemy that is not of our own making and that the federal government has to protect the individual from himself. They appear to believe that people will truly be free when the federal government has defined in law the specifics of how every aspect of everyone's life should be and has constructed an enforcement apparatus to make it happen.

The thought that there could be hundreds of millions living whose future rests completely upon their own shoulders and how they choose to provide for themselves and their families either scares or outrages them, depending on whether they believe those people to be either misguided or arrogant. Therefore, they believe that the federal government, with themselves in the driver's seat, should help plan for the fools who can't do it themselves or put in their places the reckless ones who think they can. They also appear to believe that anyone who opposes them, therefore, are the enemies of the people, and, because they have cast themselves as the voice of the people, enemies of themselves. You're either with them or you're an evil to be extirpated.

How in the world is this any different from the totalist politics of the Nazis or communists?

When I was in high school I read Jefferson's suggestion that a bloody rebellion every so often would be a good thing for the nation. My idea then was that he was saying, "Hey, if this whole Constitutional government idea we came up with doesn't work out, just toss it aside and try something else." I realize now, and I wish that more people did, that he meant, "If a system of government grows up that violates this Constitution and Declaration of Independence and starts to eat up the people's substance and to oppress the people, get rid of it, even if you have to use bloody force the same way we did against King George. You'll be doing it for the same reason. The federal government is not the United States. It's a means to an end and that end is liberty in peace. If the existing one can no longer serve as that means, scrap it and reconstitutionalize."

I'm hoping that Fred will be able to restore a little clarity to the historical perspective. For all those people in the past who yearned to be free, there are even more now, especially since the degree of oppression in the modern world far exceeds anything during the centuries that led to the American Revolution.

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